THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, October 14, 1994 TAG: 9410130173
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Over Easy
SOURCE: Jo-Ann Clegg
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
After a year of not very benign neglect my back yard has burst forth in a riot of colors this fall.
OK, I know that first sentence contains cliches worthy of a boss's tribute to a devoted employee who's about to walk out the front door with a gold watch and a 200-buck-a-month pension after 50 years of dedicated service, but this is one of those cases where only a tried and true cliche will do.
First, about that benign neglect business. I didn't mean to do any permanent harm when I ignored the time schedule for seeding, weeding, feeding and debugging. I just had other things on my mind.
Like having my leg in a cast, for instance.
At about this time last fall I was propped up in a recliner with a couple of metal screws in my ankle and several hundred dollars worth of bandages and plaster stretching from my toes to my knee.
Preparing my yard for the winter ahead was pretty far down on my priority list. Far more important was figuring out a way to carry a coffee cup from point A to point B while using crutches and being pursued by a Lhasa apso with mush in his brain and mayhem on his mind.
By spring I was off the crutches and back in the garden. I pulled a few weeds, spread sacks of mulch, planted four packets of zinnia seeds, set out several flats of assorted annuals and waited for summer to being in an earnest. Which it did.
First there was the month of unbearable heat. Four impatiens in a far corner gasped, withered and croaked during the first week. The zinnias, in protest of both weather and treatment, went on strike. From four packets of seeds I got two plants: one magenta, one orange, both trying to occupy the same three square inches of garden space.
The month of heat was followed by the month of rain. Daily rain. Millions of gallons of it. The dueling zinnias thrived. My hydrangeas rusted.
A half dozen more impatiens rolled over, dead. The Asiatic lilies developed root rot. The honeysuckle bushes smelled more like moldy tennis shoe than a $5 bottle of drug store cologne. The weeds thrived.
By mid-August I gave up and let nature take its course. Which it did. With a vengeance. Strange plants burst through the soil, climbed the fence and tried to invade the neighbor's swimming pool.
I put on my gum boots, waded into the flower bed and pulled the intruders up by their roots. Half a dozen impatiens, four lilies and two-thirds of a 10-year-old forsythia bush came with them.
The rain stopped completely just as the fall plants came into the stores. I planned my late season planting carefully: nice pale yellow mums to complement my deep blue argeratum and some brighter yellow mums to mix with the dark red ones I planned to put in the pots on the deck.
Somehow the tags got switched.
That, basically, is where the riot comes in. What I currently have in my back yard is the World War III of color clashes.
The lavender, pale pink and deep rose impatiens which were fortunate enough to survive the heat, the deluge and the current drought are blooming their fool heads off in front of pyracantha bushes loaded with fire engine red berries.
Around the corner from the pyracantha and impatiens the magenta and orange zinnias continue their fight to the death which should come with the first frost. Between them stand a pair of hollies, their berries just beginning to show the Christmas red of times to come.
The mums which were supposed to be pale yellow turned out to be the color of a newly painted school bus while the ones that were supposed to hit the deep end of the yellow chart are as pale as an undernourished summer squash.
This wouldn't be so bad if the school bus mums weren't locked in petal to petal combat with the deep purple of the argeratum and the pale mums hadn't been outflanked in the flower pots by the red variety which turned out to be the color of dried blood.
Adding even further to the backyard riot is the turquoise neon of the plastic deck chairs which I thought were a nice restful Adirondack green when I bought them.
Bill wandered out the back door one nice afternoon last weekend and sat down to look around. ``You know, I can't quite put my finger on the reason but it's just not as peaceful out here as it usually is,'' he remarked.
I didn't even try to explain. I figure we'll live with this mess until the frost comes. Maybe next spring I'll plant one of those monochrome gardens that the landscape designers featured in Southern Living like to show off.
Then again, maybe I won't. Given my choice of being boring or outrageous, I'll take outrageous every time. by CNB